Week 9 Questions

1.According to Mountfort et al. (2018), what are the three main genres of cosphotography, and how did they historically develop?

Just as fan customs have historically achieved advances in specific genres of “cosphotography,” photography and video have served as formation agents as well as reflections on how cosplay is performed. Cosphotography appears as a target of cosplay itself. In the early days, cosplay is almost entirely based on the characters present in multi-media original text, so that, unlike modern cosplay, many costumes made by practitioners have emerged as imaginative predictions of future fashion and trends, and specific source text has been derived from providing a range of interpretations of how the characters are seeing themselves. Whereas, modern cosplay is almost entirely based on the characters present in multi-media original text so that they can accurately model the appearance and behaviour of the characters.

Photographers who take pictures of cosplayers should have an understanding of the characters and genres they are trying to shoot and draw the pose or composition of the course. Also, photographers shoot various cosplayers in three different genres: Runway, Hallway and Studio portrait.

Their history begins at the first Worldcon of the 1939 World Fair. According to Mountfort et al.(2018), early Worldcon’s costuming provided important models for cosplay to be adopted and presented costumes in two major convention settings: one was a costume contest derived from the annual formal masquerade and the other was a hallway costume in informal convention spaces. “These formal and informal convention settings facilitated the emergence of two distinct photographic genres”(Mountfort,2018). It means Runway and Hallway. The runway is linked to a fashion show or fashion magazine and requires a lot of preparation and planning before taking pictures, and produces a perfect look at the course player through correction or special effects. At the same time, the Hallway appears in the form of a quick snapshot, emphasizing naturalness and creating a more relaxed atmosphere than the runway.

Mountfort et al. (2018) explain that Polaroids soon augmented black-and-white photography in the 1950s and by the 1970s, the third genre of photography, studio portraits, became prominent overtime. Studio portraits are composed of the communication of photographers and course players, presenting more detailed and carefully modeled photographs than the previous two genres. However, the production of such pictures is also considered a combination of both genres, mainly because they are performed in temporary environments, not in real studios. But over time, due to the development of various media, “High- definition phone cameras and 4k video have made the comparatively spontaneous hallway shot both easy to shoot and share, and so hallway photography remains the most ubiquitous form, if perhaps lacking the cache of runway and studio styles”(Mountfort, 2018).

References

Mountfort 2018, Planet Cosplay (Bristol, UK: Intellect Books), Chapter 2